Poetic justice at the Gulf of Mexico

This week was a special one for those who believe in the power of justice. In the beginning of the week a court in India sentenced some people for the Bhopal Gas Tragedy. The verdict ended a 26 year long wait for the victims of the tragedy. Although all of us know that the big bosses of the Union Carbide Corporation will ultimately get away with the justice since they are just too big to be brought to justice. Already the hapless people in this country have started to what we are best in doing i.e. forgetting anything that we consider tragic and painful , thinking that if we do not remember the truth , the truth will not come back to haunt us.

Another tragic event which is taking place some thousand miles away from our country at the Gulf of Mexico is also a very momentous one, indeed. But while the world feels sorry for the oil-soaked Pelicans in Louisiana very few (if any) commentator in the world media have noticed the irony and poetic justice, inherent in the oil spill. For my part, I cannot stop thinking about one man while looking at those Pelicans in agony. I cannot stop feeling that had the world at the time listened to the man, this whole tragedy at the Gulf of Mexico might not have taken place at all.

The man I am talking about is none other than Mohammad Mossadegh, former prime minister of Iran. Let me give some background history to the viewers to understand things clearly.

The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company) found oil in Iran in early 1908. This was a huge discovery for the company. Like any other corporation they tried their best to maximize their profits. These are some of the steps they took to boost their profit margin:

1. They made a deal with Iran by which the Iranians will get less than 20% of the profits generated from the export of Oil.
2. They made sure that all the extracted oil ended up in their home country, Great Britain. Iran ended up virtually getting nothing of her own oil.
3. They cut a deal whereby they would have complete monopoly over Iranian Oil for the next 60 years.
4. They did not allow the Iranians to do any bookkeeping, no Iranian were allowed to become a member of the company’s board of Directors.
5. The corporation cut backroom deals with some of the famous politicians in both Iran and UK to ensure its interests (the list includes some real famous ones like Winston Churchill and Reza Shah Pahlavi).

It is much better not to talk about the condition of the Iranian workers, working at the corporation’s oil plants. The director of Iran's Petroleum Institute wrote that

“Wages were 50 cents a day. There was no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation. The workers lived in a shanty town called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, without running water or electricity, ... In winter the earth flooded and became a flat, perspiring lake. The mud in town was knee-deep, and ... when the rains subsided, clouds of nipping, small-winged flies rose from the stagnant water to fill the nostrils .... Summer was worse. ... The heat was torrid ... sticky and unrelenting - while the wind and sandstorms shipped off the desert hot as a blower. The dwellings of Kaghazabad, cobbled from rusted oil drums hammered flat, turned into sweltering ovens. ... In every crevice hung the foul, sulfurous stench of burning oil .... in Kaghazabad there was nothing - not a tea shop, not a bath, not a single tree. The tiled reflecting pool and shaded central square that were part of every Iranian town, ... were missing here. The unpaved alleyways were emporiums for rats.”

Everything was going fine for the corporation till Mossadegh arrived in the scene. Mossadegh, who became prime minister at the age of 69, was appalled at the kind of treatment Iranians were getting from the company which was enjoying a roaring business. Mossadegh first tried to renegotiate the terms with the company but the company was to renegotiate with this western-educated and extremely mild-mannered gentleman. They thought things will be again back to normal if they simply ignore Mossadegh. They underestimated the man.

Mossadegh, after being rejected by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, took a historical decision which not even the mighty corporation expected him to take. He nationalized the oil industry and broke all relations with both the company as well as it’s chief patron, the British government. The huge empire of the mighty corporation turned to dust, overnight with just one stroke of pen by Mossadegh. The Iranian people stood behind their leader in that time which was a turning point in the history of the Middle East.

Unfortunately for the people of Iran, Mossadegh did not achieve the final victory. Just two years after the historic decision of nationalization, Mossadegh was overthrown in a military coup which brought into power the tyrannical Shah of Iran. This coup was organized by the British as well as the US government and their intelligence agencies i.e. the famous CIA and the MI6. The Shah regime reversed all the gains that Mossadegh had achieved and again the Western Oil corporations got a free hand in the Iranian oil industry for the next three decades. As for Mossadegh himself, he was put under house arrest till he died, 14 years later.

Looking at all those events now after all these years , I cannot stop feeling that had the so-called “civilized” Western countries had listened to Mossadegh at the time and reigned in the rogue Anglo-Iranian Oil Company , those Pelicans in the Gulf Coast might have been alive now.

The lesson that can be drawn from these unfortunate events is that the big corporations will do anything to achieve their target profit margins. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the price has to be paid either by the humans like those unfortunate workers at the Union Carbide or like those non-human Pelicans at the Gulf of Mexico.

Ohh , I just forgot to mention one thing …. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company exists with a different name now days. It calls itself BP.